PhD Oral Exam - Maurice Jones, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This doctoral thesis presents a Black Quantum Rhythmanalysis of urban festivals at the intersection of art, music and technology to develop new theories and methods attuned to the futures-making capacities of these rhythmic events. I trace their histories back to the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the emergence of new digital media, the internet and network culture met the rhythmic innovations of Black and Queer underground electronic music cultures. Unlike common histories of new media this study begins with sound and music as the entry point into understanding the generative work of art-music-technology festivals in producing an emerging digital culture. To do so, I draw upon the histories and philosophies of Black Atlantean music, theorized as sonic fictions by British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun (1998) in the Afrofuturist classic More Brilliant than the Sun. With sonic fiction Eshun describes the work of Black artists, such as Sun Ra, Underground Resistance and Grandmaster Flash, who deploy the sonic materiality of Black Atlantean music—the futurhythmachines of dub and funk, techno and house, jungle and drum ’n’ bass—to momentarily materialize what sound studies scholar Salomé Voegelin (2021) refers to as other possible worlds. This thesis expands the work of sonic fiction and futurhythmachines towards the realm of urban art-music-technology festivals—such as Sónar in Barcelona, FutureEverything in Manchester, CTM Festival in Berlin, and MUTEK in Montréal. I propose a Black Quantum Rhythmanalysis—a critique of reductionist understandings of time in Lefebvre’s (2004) seminal Rhythmanalysis through the work on Black temporalities and quantum physics by artist and scholar Rasheedah Phillips (2025)—to study how these festivals exercise spatial agency and temporal autonomy in traversing the spacetimes of other possible worlds.